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BMT Leads JUMP Project for Dstl

BMT is leading a Science & Technology (S&T) research project to provide military commanders with a concept demonstrator of an integrated cyber and physical mission planning toolkit.

JUMP – Joint User Mission Planning for Cyber and Electro-Magnetic Activity (CEMA) – is a joint enterprise with Riskaware and brings together all the physical knowledge a commander planning a mission needs, such as mapping, the environment, satellite imagery and 3D buildings.The demonstrator will also provide cyber situational awareness, for example, how systems and devices are connected to each other, what is the state of the services, are servers patched to the correct level and what vulnerabilities or threats exist.

The research project, which is being developed for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence, aims to provide the Front-Line Commands and other Users with an informed visual understanding of the integration of cyber operations across all domains – something that is currently missing from existing mission planning tools.

Simon Luck, Head of Technology & Innovation, Defence & Security, UK at BMT, says: “There isn’t a mission planning capability that provides that cyber view and presents the vulnerabilities and risks to the mission commander. JUMP helps to bring in new datasets very quickly, apply autonomy, to develop multiple courses of action. The system will tell you where the risk lies, your vulnerabilities according to the threats, and will help to develop a visual of your possible courses of action. JUMP facilitates the management and visualisation of the information supporting this decision-making process.”

The BMT-led initiative also allows experts in other locations to input their intelligence and share the same view using rapidly advancing technology such as VR and AR.

Luck also sees its use going beyond battle planning by the UK Ministry of Defence or other military forces. “You can use this application to protect your critical national infrastructure, to have a better understanding of it and where the risks are, and then hardening your security stance to mitigate those risks that the system has identified. JUMP is all about making much better and more informed decisions.”

BMT has recently secured a year’s further funding for the next phase of this S&T research project which will involve the team delivering additional functionality to the concept demonstrator to enable a range of cyber modelling capabilities.